The Patrol Blog is your online news source and help desk for BlogPatrol.com. We provide tips and instructions on using BlogPatrol, plus updates on enhancements and bug fixes. We also review blogging resources and blogs that pique our interest.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Thanks to all of you who commented or emailed feedback on the general login problem. In our follow-up with the users reporting in problems, everyone confirmed the ability to login as of July 29. Your timely collaboration quickly informed us when our efforts worked and when they didn't. Thank you!

During the week (July 20 to 26) that the login problem escalated to a majority of users, the BlogPatrol Web Browsers in Use report helped us to figure out that 62.35%of BlogPatrol users who accessed their account could not login successfully.

We obtained this info by doing the following nine (9) steps to:

access the Web Browsers in Use report

interact with the report using the pie chart rotation and pie chart slicingfeatures

manually add up the numbers todetermine the total percentage of users affected.

Step 3 of 9: You will get three reports: Operating Systems in Use, Web Browsers in Use, and Screen Resolutions in Use. If you need to, scroll down your browser so that the Web Browsers in Use report is in full view, as shown below.

Step 4 of 9: You can hover your mouse over the (?) question mark that appears after theWeb Browsers in Use report title to view instructions for interacting with the report: "Left click on a pie slice to move the slice away from the pie. Right click on the pie and Enable Rotation to rotate the pie chart."

Step 5 of 9: First, do the PIE CHART ROTATION by following the instructions: "...Right click on the pie and Enable Rotation to rotate the pie chart."When the mini-menu appears, as shown below, click on the Enable Rotation link.

Step 6 of 9: Once rotation is enabled, do a click-and-drag motion with your cursor to turn the pie chart in one direction or the other.

Step 7 of 9: Second, enable the PIE CHART SLICING by following the instructions: "...Right click on the pie and Enable Slicing Movement to rotate the pie chart." When the mini-menu appears, as shown below, click on the Enable Slicing Movement link.

Step 8 of 9: Click on each of the pie sections that you want to slice out. The section you click on will slice outward and away from the rest of the pie chart.

You can do this by clicking on the graphical part of the pie slice (1) or by clicking on the text for a slice (2). The second method is useful for slices that are too narrow to easily click on the graphical portion. Both methods are illustrated by the arrows in the screen shot below.

Step 9 of 9: Slice out all of the slices that you want to analyze more closely.

In our illustration, we sliced out the browsers that we knew were affected by the login problem: Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Safari, Opera 7.x, and Opera 9.x.

The values of these slices are listed below in the order presented by the pie chart:

MS Internet Explorer 7 = 19.07% (1,047 instances)

Safari = 2.8% (152 instances)

Opera 9.x = 2.4% (132 instances)

Opera 7.x = 1.8% (99 instances)

MS Internet Explorer 6 = 36.28% (1,992 instances)

The total, which we added up using a spreadsheet, was 62.35%.

So that's how we used our Web Browsers in Use stats report to determine that 62.35% of all BlogPatrol users were affected by the general login problem. We're pleased to report that 100% of users are currently able to access their account.

As always, if you're having any problems or issues with your BlogPatrol account, please let us know through our contact form.